LMS Selection Processes on Display

How have various universities selected the course management systems (CMS) or learning management systems (LMS) they are now using?

What processes did they follow? What criteria did they use?

How did they involve the eventual users in the evaluation process?

If your organization follows — or is considering — the university model for providing synchronous, instructor-led online educational events, you should take a look at Mark Smithers’ Learning and Educational Technology in Higher Education blog. He recently posted brief summaries and links to the original documentation. Sakai, Moodle, Blackboard Vista, Angel, and Desire2Learn are among the systems included.

You might also find it interesting to see that the minimum amount of time a university team spent on such a process was about nine months, with several taking a year or more.

Since his original post, several readers have submitted comments with links to additional online documentation. Read away!

Just keep in mind that these processes and outcomes might not be a match for your organization, as these are large universities, well-funded (they might disagree, but compared to a small non-profit budget, they are swimming in money), and have internal staffing to support the sorts of systems that small organizations probably couldn’t maintain.

Even so, it’s worth a look to see what they decided to evaluate and how they organized their review process.

So far, I haven’t found similar resources for associations, so if you’re willing to share your association’s process for selecting a CMS/LMS and your outcome, or if you know of a summary of such information — send the info along!